Christmas is allowed to be messy

This year Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah has been re-released as a happy Christmas song. To be fair it is a lovely version. It is a lovely, polished and pretty version.

Cohen said of his song

“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’ That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say, ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.’…
“The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, ‘Look, I don’t understand a #@$%ing thing at all – Hallelujah!’ That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.”
Ironically Hallelujah is a song about acknowledging the messiness of life. It’s about being able to embrace the mystery and confusion of life. David would start sometimes start a Psalm by acknowledging all that seemed to be going wrong in his life. He would process through his pain with God. (Disclaimer: I talk about pain a lot. That’s probably because pain, or the fear of experiencing pain, is the thing that keeps us from showing up and being seen more then anything else. Pain and shame. Few want to talk about it at Christmas time. Even though many people quietly experience it at this time of year.) Everything seemed to be going against him and nothing seemed to be working out. Yet he often finished them in a similar fashion to Cohen’s description. I don’t understand the why, but Praise God anyway.

When I read about the birth of Jesus, there doesn’t appear to be much that is pretty or polished about it. A young girl, with rumors swirling around her, gave birth to her first child, far from home, while surrounded by farm animals. Not the clean tidy nativity scene we are familiar with, but a messy, smelly, unfamiliar and crowded space.

So many Christmas songs tell a very different narrative. According to some songs baby Jesus didn’t cry. See Jesus was so holy, that even as a newborn infant he had no needs. This is a denial of his humanity. It is also a denial of our own as we are called to walk in his footsteps.

“We take on a properly antiseptic and churchy view of birth, arranged as high art to convey the seriousness and sacredness of the incarnation. It is as though the truth of birth is too secular for Immanuel. Birth doesn’t look like our concept of “holy” in its real state. So we think the first days of the God-with-us require the dignity afforded by our careful editing.” Sarah Bessey

Jesus’ birth was messy. His life was messy. And his death was most certainly messy.

There is nothing about the first Christmas that promotes performance or perfectionism, and yet, these things run rife at this time of year. People get into debt just to have the “perfect” Christmas. The house needs to be decorated just “right”. With the “right” presents, the “right”food and family behaving the “right” way. So much pressure!

Could it be possible to decorate and exchange gifts and eat food without all the pressure of trying to make the holiday look like a pinterest board?

Christmas can be messy partly because Christmas involves family, and family can be…well…messy.

God could have chosen his birth to look any way He wanted. He chose for it to be messy and imperfect. There is freedom in that. God is okay with your mess. Yes we aspire to grow and develop and heal, but God is also quite comfortable hanging out with you being the hot mess that you are.

We are allowed to be messy and imperfect…even at Christmas time.

Christmas light image taken from Flickr